Items tagged with U.S.

It was always assumed (outside of Cupertino, anyway) that if Apple released a bigger size iPhone model to compete with large screen Android devices, it would be a huge hit. Well, that notion was proven right when Apple launched its 4.7-inch iPhone 6 (1334x750; 326 ppi) and 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus (1920x1080; 401 ppi) models, which combined to break sales records. Those flurry of initial sales weren't just a knee jerk reaction, either -- Kantar Worldpanel ComTech notes that the latest smartphone sales data for the three months ending November 2014 shows that the impact of the iPhone 6 launch continued...Read more...

The controversy surrounding news of the NSA’s wide-ranging spying tactics is causing ripples in other aspects of U.S. – European Union relations. Based on information released by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor, the EU voted to support its own commission in the event the commission decides end data sharing agreements between the EU and the U.S. The commission is investigating both the reach of the NSA’s spying tactics as well as reports that the U.K. has been involved in a similar spying program. European Parliament The vote could prove to be an important one because...Read more...

The high-speed Internet advocacy Web site, Speed Matters, has just released a report on the average Internet connection speeds by U.S. state. If you live in Rhode Island (6,769 Kbps), Delaware (6,685 Kbps), New Jersey (5,825 Kbps), Virginia (5,033 Kbps), or Massachusetts (4,564 Kbps), you can take pride that your state has one of the fastest average Internet downstream connection speeds in the U.S. But before you get too smug, compare your speed against the average 63 Mbps downstream speed that the Communications Workers of America (CWA) claims Japan has... Or South Korea (49 Mbps), Finland (21...Read more...

A study just released by the Leichtman Research Group, indicates that the "twenty largest cable and telephone providers in the US" now total approximately 65.1 million, high-speed Internet subscribers. Those 20 providers make up roughly 94 percent of the U.S. broadband market. Assuming that Leichtman's results are correct (and assuming that Neilson's latest numbers are as well, which show 164 million U.S. users went online in May 2007), this would mean that about only 42 percent of U.S. Internet users connect via a broadband connection. This is significantly lower than the 55 percent of adult Americans...Read more...

What do providing secret service protection for former vice presidents and going after cyber criminals have in common? (And no, Al Gore did not have his identity stolen--at least not as far as we know). They are both part of the same bill that was just passed by the Senate. Current legislation lacks the necessary breadth to go after and punish how cyber criminals do their dirty work these days. A cyber-crime bill, the Identity Theft Enforcement and Restitution Act, was introduced by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) last October and it was unanimously passed by the Senate...Read more...

A study on laptop loss at airports was just released, and we don't know what is more depressing: how many laptops are "lost" at the airport, how few of the "lost" laptops have their data protected, or how few of the "lost" laptops are ever recovered. The Airport Insecurity: The Case of Lost Laptops report was conducted by the Ponemon Institute and was sponsored by Dell. The report finds that "business travelers lose more than 12,000 laptops per week in U.S. airports." That works out to over 62,400 laptops per year. If the average business laptop costs $1,200, then roughly $749 million worth of...Read more...

As hard as it may be to believe, according to a study by research firm Parks Associates, nearly 20% of the population of the United States is disconnected from the Internet and has never used email. In their annual phone survey of U.S. households, Parks Associates found 20 million households are without Internet access, approximately 18% of the U.S."Nearly one out of three household heads has never used a computer to create a document. These data underscore the significant digital divide between the connected majority and the homes in the unconnected minority that rarely, if ever, use a computer.""Internet...Read more...

Wikileaks was started with the intention of allowing whistleblowers to anonymously release government and corporate documents, "an uncensorable version of Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. " Of course, that only works if the site is reachable.A federal judge in San Francisco has shut down a Web site that posted more than a million government and corporate documents from whistleblowers and others alleging criminal acts worldwide.A permanent injunction was issued Friday by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White. It was sought by the Swiss banking group Julius Baer after internal...Read more...

With several countries offering cheap broadband internet to the masses, the U.S. is starting to look like we're in the slow lane, at least according to a bill introduced by Massachusetts Representative, Ed Markey.What is clear is that broadband providers are charging an arm and a leg compared to other countries, and possibly even mislabeling products such as Comcast declaring their service to be 'unlimited' but then disconnected users who 'use too much'.“What's less clear is how badly the country that gave birth to the Internet is doing, and whether the government needs to step in and do something...Read more...

If you are a user in the United States, you can no longer use TorrentSpy. However, that's not necessarily a bad thing as the site had been ordered to start tracking users. Citing privacy, TorrentSpy now gives an error message if a user with a U.S. IP address tries to search. US users of the popular Torrent search site TorrentSpy can use the site no more—at least not for now. TorrentSpy has begun to block all searches by US visitors, instead redirecting search requests to a page with the headline "TorrentSpy Acts to Protect Privacy." The page says that TorrentSpy has chosen to block US...Read more...

Home Media Research, a division of Home Media Magazine, released sales results for the different high-definition movie disc camps today - and the results were not good for HD-DVD. Blu-ray high-definition movie discs outsold films on the rival HD-DVD format by 2-to-1 in the United States in the first half of 2007, Home Media Research said on Tuesday. The division of Home Media Magazine said total sales of Blu-ray discs, using a Sony Corp-backed technology, totaled 1.6 million units from January 1 through July 1, compared with 795,000 HD-DVD discs sold in that period. It's not really...Read more...

A study conducted by Hope Cummings of the University of Michigan and Elizabeth Vandewater of the University of Texas at Austin sampled a group of adolescents, both gamers and non-gamers, from around the U.S. to find out where they find the time to play games and what parts of their lives suffer as a result. They found that boys spent an average of 58 minutes playing games on weekdays and one hour and 37 minutes playing on weekend days. They also found that girls spent 44 minutes playing on a weekday and an hour and four minutes playing on weekend days. To make time for all this gaming,...Read more...

These numbers speak for themselves: "Over a period of two years, the hackers, still unknown, were able to download 45.7 million credit card numbers, with estimates in the Wall Street Journal article suggesting it might reach 200 million, spanning a period of more than four years. Clearly this is a big deal. Whether we shopped at these stores or not, we are all paying for this credit theft. Banks are having to reissue credit cards (this costs the banks), and investigators in eight countries are pursuing the use of these numbers (this diminishes the law enforcement available to fight other cybercrimes)."...Read more...